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Yet the FBI that Hoover created almost singlehanded in his 48 years as its autocratic boss may well be the world's most effective and proficient police organization. He took over a collection of poorly trained Justice Department investigators in 1924. By the time of his death, at 77, last year, he had assembled a force of 8,500 agents who are the elite of U.S. police officers, better-paid and better-trained than any others. They share an esprit de corps that has only recently been endangered by the controversy over Gray.
The FBI's jurisdiction is vast, covering nearly every federal crime except narcotics and tax violations. Its well-funded crime laboratory is superb, its files on some 6,000,000 Americans are if anything too complete, and its computerized collection of the fingerprints of some 90 million people forms a huge identification resource. The bureau's services, dispensed from about 500 field offices, are invaluable to some 4,000 state, county and local police agencies, which can get FBI information through Teletype networks.
Hoover employed that huge reservoir of intelligence and investigative talent with a free hand that no President or Attorney General, ostensibly his immediate superior, seriously challenged. Political liberals often assailed Hoover for being too preoccupied with suspected Communist subversives—and later with antiwar radicals and black militants. Liberals and other critics charged that he was an eager cop out of control and responsible to no one. Yet he was never accused of using the extensive powers of the FBI to further the partisan ends of any Administration.
He was not, however, reluctant to curry the favor of Presidents by feeding them gossip out of FBI files. Lyndon Johnson often chortled at the "secret" material on politicians that Hoover passed to him; L.B.J. would show some of it around the White House. One high Johnson aide exploded in anger when he saw his own dossier and found that an FBI informant had described him as a homosexual. This false report had been based on an offhand bit of name-calling by a Southern politician at a public rally and was dutifully recorded without checking by the FBI's man.
Ordinary citizens, of course, do not see their own files. One Johnson aide who was given a look at some files found an unusual preoccupation with sex in them. "There were long paragraphs devoted to anonymous information about men's sex lives," he recalls. One man being checked for a Washington job was described by an agent as living with a woman other than his wife; actually, he had remarried and was living with his second wife. Hoover's worst transgression of this type was to permit an aide to play tapes for selected newsmen of intercepted telephone conversations involving Martin Luther King Jr., the black leader